Chapter 18
It’s 4 a.m. and Kate is wide awake again. Why does her body do this to her? Jay is snoring and Rosie is asleep in her Moses basket after a feed, but Kate’s mind doesn’t want to switch off, no matter how much her body craves sleep.
She reaches for her phone. There are new messages from Emma and Leonie sent last night, individual ones, as well as the messages they put in the group chat apologising for not inviting her to Emma’s wedding dress shopping trip.
Sorry again for messing up, Kate, wrote Leonie. If you change your mind, here are the details for the dress shop. We’ll be meeting there at 11.30 on Saturday. Would be lovely to see you xx
She doesn’t feel ready to reply yet, hurt still sitting like a stone in her stomach at the feeling of having been left out by her closest friends. It reminds her of all the times she felt out of place as a child for being too quiet, too bookish or not something enough, the something being too hard to put her finger on. Over recent years, she’d finally found her tribe and come to feel happy in her own skin, so being excluded again like that stings. She reminds herself that she’s a grown-up – somebody’s actual mother – but it doesn’t take away the pain.
Kate clicks on the link, though, bringing up the website of an incredibly chic bridal boutique in Angel. The dresses all look to be designer, nothing like the second-hand dress Kate bought for ￡50 from a vintage shop to wear to her own wedding at Lambeth Town Hall.
Sleep still evading her, she scrolls back through the photos on her phone until she finds her wedding pictures. The morning of her wedding, Kate went for a swim in the lido. As she walked into the town hall to be married, she smelt like chlorine and the rosemary nestled amongst her bouquet of daisies and cornflowers, a nod to the one person who couldn’t be there in person. She’d been there, too, in the second-hand wedding rings that Kate and Jay slipped onto each other’s fingers, left to Kate by a woman whose marriage lasted more than fifty years.
After the ceremony, they headed to Brockwell Park for a picnic. It had rained, but they didn’t care, all huddling under rainbow umbrellas beneath the trees. There’s one photo that’s a particular favourite, which shows her and Jay standing at the top of the hill in the park under an umbrella. You can just make out the guests in the background, but Kate and Jay are focused only on one another, kissing as the summer rain falls down above them.
We looked so happy, Kate thinks as she turns to take in the sight of her husband sleeping beside her now, his body curled up and facing away from her. It feels as though a distance has grown between them recently and she doesn’t know how to fix it. Will she ever be able to get back to that feeling she had as they sheltered under the umbrella together, so in love and so hopeful about their future?
She keeps on scrolling, images of their life together flashing by. Pictures of the lido on sunny days and rainy ones, meals with friends, snaps of the fruit and veg stand on Electric Avenue when the colours just looked too delicious not to capture. Eventually, she comes all the way back to the last photo she took – the sign for the Farleigh-on-Avon River Swimming, Bathing and Recreational Water-Based Activities Club.
Looking at it again, she remembers her conversation with the woman in the supermarket whose words had felt like a hand reaching out to her, pulling her out of a swirling current. Don’t forget to look after yourself.
For the past five years, looking after herself has meant swimming. She has to get back to it. Even if that means having to brave the intimidatingly official-sounding swimming group. Kate thinks for a moment about what Rosemary would say, a smile appearing on her face at the thought. Rosemary would tell her to dig out her swimming costume and get in the water. ‘Because you never regret a swim.’