A Merry Mistletoe Wedding (6 page)

‘Definitely time to go.' Sam – at last – discovered a sense of urgency and gave Milly a hug. ‘Be good for Thea and be nice to Alfie. We'll call as soon as we know whether you've got a baby brother or a sister. Emily? Come
on
. You can't have a baby on a damp lawn.'

Emily, who was now wearing a pair of Thea's leggings and the baggiest long top Thea could find that would fit over the baby, waved a goodbye to them all and headed for the house, leaving behind a chorus of good-luck wishes. By the time she'd reached the front door she had to stop again for another session of mooing, this time while bracing herself against the post at the bottom of the stairs.

‘I hope she makes it in time,' Anna said, looking anxiously after the two of them. ‘Should you go too, Thea? Or maybe me or both of us? Suppose she ends up having it in the car?'

‘Sam won't let that happen. He's very proud of those smart leather seats,' Mike said, chuckling.

‘I can't go – I've got the children here for the night. Don't worry, Mum, she'll be fine. It's not far.'

Thea crossed her fingers in the hope that what she said was true. She felt excited for her sister but also tense. Although she'd watched several episodes of
One Born Every Minute
, she'd never actually seen anyone in labour in real life before and had been startled at how
earthy
Emily had suddenly become once nature took over during those contractions. Emily, who was normally quite prim and controlled, had turned positively animal. Thea felt a surge of hope and delight about the idea that one day she and Sean might have a baby of their own. They hadn't talked about it yet but she remembered that time on the beach last Christmas, before they'd properly got together, when he'd said that he'd like some children one day. Would he cope with seeing
her
like that? It didn't seem to bother Sam in the slightest; he'd been more concerned with borrowing a towel for his car seats.

Just before she, Elmo and Jimi left, Rosie helped Thea take the last of the dishes into the kitchen and loaded them into the dishwasher. ‘I see Emily's managed to make this afternoon all about
her
, as usual,' she said. ‘I mean, I don't want to be horrid about your sister but she is always a bit of a drama queen.'

‘Well, she could hardly help the timing,' Thea said, resisting the urge to take over with the cutlery; she hated the knives being loaded blade-side up. She had visions of someone accidentally tripping and landing on one. Maybe she wasn't so unlike Emily after all.

‘No. Well, that's true, I suppose. But whatever your news was going to be just faded into the background after the soggy-cushion event. I'm dying to know what it is. Is it hats or knitting?'

Thea laughed, trying to work out what she meant. ‘Hats or knitting? Knitted hats?'

Rosie plonked a saucepan into the dishwasher. ‘Oh, you know what I mean.' She stopped and had a quick look over her shoulder to check for anyone who'd overhear, then went on in a dramatic half-whisper, ‘Is it something to congratulate you for? Hats for a wedding, knitting for a baby … Or …' She stopped suddenly. ‘Sorry. Oh God, I'm being really tactless, aren't I? Suppose it's neither but you wanted both? Maybe you've been promoted to head teacher, or you were going to say you've won the lottery or something. Sorry, Thea, just delete everything I've said. I'm an idiot.' Rosie flapped a tea towel to cool her reddening face, and Thea was very tempted just to blurt out the wedding plans to her but managed not to. If she couldn't tell the whole family all at once then she really wanted her parents to know first and Rosie, as she'd just proved, was something of a blurter. She would never keep it in till Thea found the right moment for the rest of them. It would have to wait. Besides, with Emily having the baby, they'd all got plenty to think about. She and Sean would tell them together – he'd said he hoped to be up to visit her at the weekend.

‘Rosie, really you haven't said anything idiotic, not even close. And what I was going to say, well, it can keep for another day.' She went to the fridge and took out a can of Coke. ‘Here – go and give this to Elmo. He was looking a bit shell-shocked about Emily mooing. I expect he could do with something to cool him down.'

Rosie laughed. ‘OK. Though I have to say it isn't such a bad thing for him to see. Now he's coming up to the age of … well, possibly getting it on with a girl, or at least considering it possible, perhaps he'll remember Emily going into labour and it'll make him think twice about taking daft risks. I've already bulk-bought condoms in case. Jimi says it'll only encourage him but I remember teen boys. They don't need encouragement – their hormones do that for them. They just need practical solutions.'

Thea, thinking this was possibly too much information about her lovely nephew, took mugs of tea out to Mike and Anna, who were on the garden bench with the Sunday papers. Then she sploshed the remaining dishes about in the sink, and had a quick look out at where Milly and Alfie were lining up some snails they'd found and were trying to make them race across the terrace by waving lettuce leaves at them.

‘Are you two OK out there? Do you need anything?'

‘A biscuit?' Milly asked quickly.

Emily preferred them to have fruit rather than biscuits, Thea knew, but she was their aunt not their mother and, besides, she wanted them to be happy staying overnight with her so they'd want to come again. She wanted to have a baby of her own, but if – and she tried not to think like this, and the doctors had given her no reason to but occasionally it crept up – if that miscarriage had been only the first of several, then she'd want to be the best aunt she could be and at least have the delight of seeing (and helping as far as possible) her sister's and brother's children grow up.

‘Jammie Dodgers?' Thea took the packet out of the cupboard and Milly and Alfie skipped into the room looking far more thrilled than ordinary biscuits deserved.

‘Yeah! Wow!' Alfie gasped as if she'd offered him priceless truffles and an array of top-class pâtisserie.

‘Mummy says biscuits will break all our teeth and they'll fall out and we'll have to eat with our gums and only have horrid soup for ever and ever,' Milly said, chomping into a biscuit. Thea felt a tiny moment of guilt. Perhaps she should have respected their mother's views and given them more strawberries instead. There were still some in the fridge so she took them out and put them on a plate with a couple more biscuits each. ‘I'm sure that just for once your teeth will be safe. You can give them an extra good scrub at bedtime.'

‘Will we have our new brother or sister before we go to sleep?' Alfie asked.

‘I don't know, darling. I suppose you might. If it comes, your daddy is going to call to tell us.'

‘Will the baby want a biscuit? Should we save one for it?' he went on.

‘Don't be stupid.' Milly gave him a scornful look. ‘Babies don't eat
biscuits
. They haven't grown any teeth yet. They just have juice and stuff.' She thought for a moment. ‘They have milk. From
breasts
.' She looked down and pointed to her own chest.

‘Ugh, that's '
gusting
,' Alfie spluttered.

The two of them went back outside to line up their snails again, leaving Thea strangely emotional at the thought of Alfie already wanting to include his as-yet-unborn sibling in the biscuit allocation. He was only just six and it seemed so sweet and automatically loving to accept – without question or jealousy or any sense of being displaced as the family baby – that there'd be someone else to consider. When her phone rang, she had to take a few seconds to blow her nose and wipe a silly tear away before answering.

‘Did you tell them? What did they say?' Sean sounded anxious, excited to hear her family's reaction to their plans. Thea took her phone up to her bedroom and opened the window to let in the scent of the roses that were still blooming generously on her wall. A small chill breeze sneaked into the room, a reminder that although the day had been hot and sunny, autumn was out there, getting closer. It would be almost dark by eight too. In Cornwall, Sean would get half an hour longer of daylight but darker mornings. On some nights in early July, it had hardly seemed to get dark at all there.

‘Sorry, Sean, I was desperate to but I didn't get a chance,' she told him. ‘I was just starting to tell them, but then at the crucial moment Emily scuppered it by going into labour, so the moment passed and everyone was busy making sure she got off to the hospital OK. As a lead-up, I did slightly mention them all possibly going to Cornwall again at Christmas but Emily was definite that she wasn't planning on going anywhere but her own home and that she'd hated it last year so I feel a bit up in the air now. I expect it'll be OK. Somehow.'

‘You want her to be here with us though, don't you?'

Thea felt a bit choked up all over again, ‘Well, of course I do. How can I get married without my awful grumpy sister being there to be picky about what I'm wearing, about the venue, the flowers, to criticize my hair and so on?' She sniffed and reached for a tissue from the bedside table. ‘Yes, I want her there. But I'm just being selfish. She's got more to think about right now than whether to buy a hat or not. I've got the children here for the night. Also Mum and Dad are still here being all nervy about Emily. We all are.'

‘Of course you are. She's the priority right now – her and the baby. How's Sam?'

‘Ha, Sam! He's being pretty cool about it all but in the end he hustled Emily off to the hospital as fast as he could.'

‘I'll be able to come up next weekend. Maybe we can talk to them all then, together. Would that be OK?'

‘Oh yes, way more than OK – brilliant! It's only been a couple of days but I miss you
so
damn much!'

‘And I miss you too, Elf. Is it all right if I bring Woody? I could leave him at a cattery but I think he'd rather be with us.'

‘Definitely. I can't wait to see him again.'

‘More than me?'

‘Of course.
Far
more than you!'

Once back in the kitchen Thea found Anna switching on the kettle for the third time that afternoon and rinsing out the mugs they'd been using.

‘It doesn't matter how old you all get, it's the default setting of a parent never to stop worrying about their offspring.'

‘You could have gone to the hospital with them,' Mike told her. ‘Sam said he didn't mind. He even actually invited you.'

‘
Sam
might not mind but I caught the look on Emily's face when he suggested it. And I can't say I blame her – I'd have hated my mother being in the room when I was giving birth. She'd probably have told me I was doing it all wrong.'

‘You wouldn't do that with Emily,' Thea said. ‘And you wouldn't have needed to go into the actual delivery room.'

‘She'd have worried I could hear her.
I'd
have worried I could hear her. There's nothing worse than your child being in pain, even if they aren't far off forty. No, I'll wait it out. Shall I bath the children? How about making up their beds? I need something to do.'

‘The beds are done – I did them yesterday. And Jimi will be back soon with their overnight things. You can read them a bedtime story if you like. I've got a heap of books for them.'

‘I'll do that then,' Anna agreed. ‘I just want to keep busy. Oh, and Thea?' She turned back just as she was going to round up the children. ‘What was it you were going to tell us? It sounded important.'

Thea smiled. ‘Oh, it's fine, it was nothing much,' she said. ‘Nothing that won't keep.'

Emily couldn't stop looking at this strange new tiny person who lay in the transparent plastic crib beside her bed. His plump, pink little face was half-submerged in the clumsily knitted blue blanket that Charlotte had insisted on making for her. ‘I know it'll be a boy,' she'd said as she handed it to Emily. ‘So I wasn't going to bother with some daft neutral just-in-case colour.' Emily had decided then and there she'd manage to ‘lose' the blanket somehow, and would wrap her baby in the soft old cream cashmere one she'd had for Alfie – but Sam had put this one in the bag at the last minute and she now found she felt very fond of it. Something handmade, however ineptly (the thing had several dropped stitches and one very wobbly edge), with affection and care could only be full of warmth and love: a baby, all instinct and no knowledge, would surely sense that.

Emily couldn't sleep, although she knew she should try to. She was desperate to go home even though it was only 5 a.m. The hospital hadn't let her go earlier as she'd hoped to because her son had been born at 11 p.m. and the staff insisted on her staying until the morning to be sure all was well with the two of them.

One more hour, she couldn't help thinking as she gazed at him. That's all it would have taken to get him to 1 September. But whether those sixty minutes had blighted his future chances of getting into a top university eighteen years from today didn't matter at all at the moment. There he was, all fresh, pink, perfect and asleep. Soon he'd wake for feeding, changing and a lifetime of needing her. No one could
not
love being needed.

Like most of her new class, but not quite like the scary-looking shorn-headed little boys, Thea had had her hair cut for the start of the new school year. That Tuesday morning, she'd washed it in the shower, flicked it up, tufted it out and secured bits of it with gel. In the interests of not getting glared at by the traditionalist school head, she'd washed out the few pink and lilac streaks that had jollied it up over the summer, but she still kept it short and spiky as she had since she'd had ten inches cut off after Rich had left her a year ago. It had been a small act of defiance at the time, since he had preferred her with long hair, but she'd decided it suited her far better like this. She could always grow it again in the future when her jawline sagged and she needed something to hide behind.