Chapter Twenty-Eight
Hilary was bored to tears and wishing she was at home. In fact, she wished she was anywhere but here. She’d only agreed to come because she’d been afraid what the group would say about her behind her back if she didn’t join them.
Lunch with ‘the Girls’ – Susanne, Lynne, Julie and Gabriella – was a tradition that had begun over four decades ago.
Back then, they’d been young twenty-somethings who’d met at NCT classes when they were all expecting their first baby.
After a month of classes, the five of them had broken away from the original group to form their own as an antidote to the fearmongering fostered by their teacher, a middle-aged earth-mother type.
Every session she’d instructed them on what they could and couldn’t eat and drink or what they should and shouldn’t do while pregnant, as well as highlighting the myriad dangers of giving birth.
The way the woman had gone on, they’d be lucky to survive!
Finding the sessions unhelpful, the five of them had declined to attend any more and instead had met up for lunch to share books and magazines on pregnancy, labour and motherhood, and usually with a glass of wine to go with their meal.
It was their only glass of the week, they would claim, but all knowing they were lying.
Their get-togethers had been fun, and they’d supported each other every step of the way.
When their babies had arrived, they’d continued to meet up, now sharing their anecdotal horror stories of labour, breastfeeding and lack of sleep.
As support networks went, it was the best and had seen them through all the many years and major life events.
But where was that support now when Hilary needed it most?
They’d been supportive enough in the early weeks of Hugh’s death, but as time had passed, they’d drawn back from her, seldom asking how she was.
Keith had once commented when she’d remarked on their lack of interest and sympathy that perhaps they’d grown tired of hearing the same answer from her.
It had been such a cruelly insensitive thing to say, and it should have warned her that there was worse to come from him.
Just how callously he would ultimately behave, she would never have imagined.
The Girls had been shocked when she’d shared with them that Keith had left her, but Gabriella had had the temerity to say, and quite offhandedly, that it was common for a marriage to break down following the death of a child, because in some cases it had only been the child keeping them together in the first place.
Hilary had been incensed and hadn’t spoken to Gabriella again until she’d apologised, no doubt at the request of the rest of the Girls.
And what a joke that was, she thought, glancing around the table at the lined and wrinkled faces, that they still called themselves girls when they were well into their sixties, two of them nearer seventy than sixty!
It was ridiculous. Just as it was ridiculous that she was putting herself through this charade of all-friends-together over lunch at their regular haunt, the Green Man in Grantchester.
These women weren’t her friends anymore.
If they were, they’d be more understanding. They’d show genuine compassion.
But why would they understand what she was going through when their own lives were so blessedly untouched by the profoundest of loss: the loss of a child?
The problems they’d experienced didn’t come close.
Susanne’s son had had a gambling problem for a while and Julie’s daughter had had a drugs problem five years ago, but all was hunky-dory now and Julie and her husband were thrilled that a grandchild – their first – was now on the way.
No, none of those trifling little so-called problems came anywhere close to what Hilary had suffered.
The news that Julie was at last going to be a grandmother meant that Hilary was the odd one out, the only one of the group who would never know that pleasure.
Whenever they met, photos of cherubically adorable grandchildren were relentlessly shared on their mobiles and ooh-ed and aah-ed over.
Although in Hilary’s opinion, Lynne’s granddaughter was never going to win any best-baby prizes; she looked like an angry, piggy-eyed, red-faced troll.
It was now the middle of October and two weeks since Nina had shattered Hilary’s hope of ever being a grandmother.
She had watched Nina drive away that evening, somehow still holding on to the faint hope that her daughter-in-law would reverse up the driveway, rush to the front door and say she’d changed her mind, that she would try one more time to have Hugh’s child.
But Nina had gone and after Hilary had closed the front door, she had sunk onto the bottom step of the stairs and wept, her head resting against the wall, her heart breaking for Hugh and all that might have been.
For him. And her. She had stayed there until it was dark and then she had gone up the stairs to Hugh’s old bedroom and where she kept all her guilty but very precious secrets.
Holding one of them to her chest as a comforter, she had lain on the bed and wept some more until she had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep.
Remembering now, and with a painful jolt to her heart, how alone, empty and bereft she’d felt that night, Hilary slipped her hand into her handbag, found her wallet and picked out what she was sure would cover the cost of her share of the lunch, most of which she hadn’t been able to eat.
She couldn’t remember when she’d last experienced hunger, or enjoyed anything she ate.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, slapping the money down onto the table and getting clumsily to her feet, ‘I’m not feeling well, I need to go.’
And she did. She fled, before anyone could try to stop her or ask if they could help in any way. She was in such a desperate hurry to escape, she almost tripped over a small apricot-coloured poodle with a couple sitting at a nearby table.
She drove out of the car park as fast as she dared, vowing never to put herself through another of these unbearable lunches.
She wasn’t one of the Girls anymore.
And that was something else she’d lost.