Walking Back to Happiness (17 page)

Even better were the lunches she’d had out with the NCT crowd. Unashamed carb fests, where they’d confessed all their parenting faux pas and ‘where does this go?’ moments, and cackled darkly until their stitches ached about the stupid things they thought they’d do with their perfect, easy-sleeping cherubs before they actually arrived.

It wasn’t all rose-tinted, she reminded herself. Feeding Toby involved a frustrating amount of wiping up and begging. He only seemed to buck up his table manners for supper time when Peter got home in time to feed him, catch up on parenting by debrief, while Toby sat there glowing like a Pampers advert.

Was it really any wonder she’d ended up needing to turn herself into someone . . .

Stop right there, thought Louise. Stop it. Do not think about it. Get back on track. Back in the line for baguettes, back in Douglas’s good books with overtime. The old Louise Davies is
back
.

Her mobile rang in her pocket and she grabbed it, her mind racing between her mum, Toby, the nursery, work . . .

Another side effect of Ben’s death: no phone call now came without a frisson of possible disaster.

‘Lulu? Can you talk?’

It was Peter. Her heart sank a little bit.

‘Hi,’ she said, inching forward in the queue. ‘I’m just getting lunch.’

‘Can’t talk for long,’ he said, as he always did when he called during the day. ‘I just wanted to see if you were available on Friday night – for a date?’

‘Who with?’ Louise hated the ‘ha ha!’ tone in her voice. It felt forced, but then so did asking your wife if she was free for a date.

‘With me! I’ve managed to squeeze us into a
very
small wine-tasting supper that they’re running at the White Hart.’ Peter paused, waiting for her gasp of delight. ‘You know, the one that was in the paper at the weekend. In Guidley.’

‘I know where you mean.’ It was an old pub that had very expensive linens and a chef who’d escaped from the River Café with his own pasta machine. ‘It sounded amazing.’

‘Should be! Thought I’d let you know early so you could get the babysitting sorted out.’

Babysitting being something only
she
could sort out, of course, thought Louise, grumpily. Either from her piled-high desk in the CPS building or from the queue of a deli.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll make some calls and get back to you.’

Louise realised a microsecond too late that she sounded like her own assistant, but by then Peter was in the process of ringing off himself, and probably hadn’t noticed that they’d just conducted a whole conversation using the voices of bad local rep actors.

She sighed and put the phone back in her bag.

‘Hi? Next? What can I get you?’ called the number-four sandwich-maker.

Louise stared at the chalkboard and realised she wasn’t actually hungry, but she ordered a Greek-salad baguette, because that’s what she’d always had for lunch before she’d had Toby, and somehow just seeing it being prepared in the same old way brought a little bit of smoothness back to her chest.

Before Toby, Louise had been the office cheerleader for the ‘why should we cover for the mums?’ brigade, and so she tried to make her babysitting pleas while she walked back to the court for the afternoon session. She didn’t want anyone listening in and reminding her of her old smug idiocy.

Diane was her first port of call.

‘Hello, darling.’ Diane’s voice was hushed. ‘Is everything OK? I can’t really talk now.’

‘Can’t you?’ Louise checked her watch. ‘Where are you? In the library?’

‘No. Um, what’s up? Is it Toby?’

‘Sort of.’ Louise was a bit thrown by Diane’s evasiveness. Juliet had mentioned that she’d been acting a bit odd when she’d run into her the other day. There was the new haircut, for a start. And talk of laser eye surgery. ‘I don’t suppose you could have Toby for the evening on Friday, could you? Peter’s taking me out for a wine-tasting dinner at the White Hart.’

‘Oh lovely! Like a date!’ whispered Diane.

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Oh, I’m
so
pleased you two are getting some time together. It’s really important when you’re in the early years to remember you’re not just Mummy and Daddy. If your father and I hadn’t bought the caravan after Ian was born, we—’

‘Mmm, so can you?’ Louise didn’t want her mum venturing any further down that road; there had already been several pointed conversations about ‘not waiting too late’ and the sixteen-month age gap between her and Juliet. She hoped Diane wasn’t making similar comments about ageing ovaries to poor Juliet.

She flinched, remembering some pretty tactless things
she’d
said to Juliet, before Ben died. Things she wished she could explain, if only she and Juliet were on their old easy terms. There was a lot that Louise wished she could go back and undo, but falling out with her sister, at the worst possible time in her whole life, was top of the list.

Diane was making apologetic noises. ‘Did you say Friday? I can’t do Friday. I’m helping Beryl with the supper for the book group.
Thursday’s
fine . . .’

‘No, it’s got to be Friday.’ Louise felt a guilty frisson of relief. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to go. Maybe there’d be a reprieve – from the date and from the romantic overtures that were bound to follow.

No, come on, she told herself. It’s like going to the gym; you enjoy it once you get there. And you
love
Italian food.

‘Why don’t you phone Juliet?’ her mother suggested. ‘She’ll be in. She can pop over for a few hours. If you put Toby to bed before you go out, she won’t even have to worry about settling him.’

‘What about Minton? She’d have to leave him at her house.’

‘Oh, he’ll be fine on his own for one evening,’ said Diane. ‘Or she could leave him next door with Lorcan.’

‘Lorcan?’ Louise felt painfully out of the loop. It was months since Juliet had told her anything more personal than . . . She racked her brains. Juliet hadn’t even discussed how she’d felt after the funeral. That was how bad things were.

‘Yes, the builder who lives next door with the Kellys. Very nice chap. Bit unshaven but reliable. Rather a flirt, but that never hurt anyone!’

‘She never mentioned anything like that to me,’ said Louise.

‘Didn’t she?’ Diane sounded surprised. ‘I thought . . . Well. I’m sure she will, if you two get a chance to chat properly over a bottle of wine. Like you used to.’

‘We’re both pretty busy,’ said Louise, defensively. ‘I barely get time to wash my hair since I’ve gone back to work. And I don’t want to
force
Jools into seeing me.’

There was a pause from Diane’s end.

‘What, Mum?’ she asked, more briskly than she meant to. ‘Go on, whatever you’re thinking.’

‘Have you two fallen out and not told me?’

Louise stopped walking and stepped into the doorway of Boots. She’d been waiting months for her mother to come out and ask that exact question, but now it was out there, hanging between them, she wasn’t sure what she should say.

Yes, she and Juliet had fallen out, but not in that hair-pulling, Jeremy Kyle fishwife, slanging-match way. It was worse than that. It had been a really simple conversation that had started well but gone down an unexpected track, like an out-of-control toboggan, and left them both startled at how little they actually knew about each other.

It had been a night ‘away from the boys’, just the two of them round at hers with a bottle of wine not long after Ben’s birthday. But after just one glass, Juliet had let slip something about her and Ben that had stunned Louise into temporary silence, and, because she wasn’t sure what advice to offer, that had led her to confess something equally awful to Juliet. But the expression on her sister’s face had stopped her, just before the biggest confession could burst out.

Even here, outside Boots on the High Street, she could still see Juliet’s eyes, usually so forgiving, hardening like coal. And then she’d grabbed her coat and left, without waiting for the explanation, and Louise had been left to polish off the rest of the wine, plus half another bottle, and then it had been too late to phone her up and say the words that would have fixed things between friends. Juliet wasn’t a friend though, she was her sister.

It would have been bad enough facing Juliet the next morning, once the hangover had worn off, but just twenty-four hours later, Ben was lying dead in Longhampton Hospital, and grief and confusion had flooded the whole family. Not washing the bad feelings away like sand, but somehow solidifying them, like the bodies at Pompeii. It was all still there – the secrets, the unasked questions – but hidden.

Louise rested her head against the marble of the shopfront and wondered how much, if any, of this her mother needed to know. Maybe a better question was, how much did she already know?

‘Why do you say that?’ she hedged.

Diane didn’t have Louise’s court skills. She might be a schemer, but under questioning, she was open like Juliet, confessing everything.

‘Because there’s an
atmosphere
when you two are together. I noticed it the other day, when I picked up Toby. She was behaving very oddly . Be honest – is it that she’s jealous of you having him? I didn’t think she and Ben were trying for children. But then would she tell me? Did she say anything to you?’

Louise felt bad, grabbing the nearest excuse, but she did. ‘I think they were thinking about it. That’s why I don’t want to force babysitting on her. Don’t want to rub it in.’

‘Oh, but she loves Toby,’ said Diane immediately. ‘Juliet’s
young
, plenty of time for her to have her own family yet. I mean, I know it wouldn’t be Ben’s, and I know he was the love of her life, but . . . Oh dear. It’s so hard knowing what to do for the best. I think it would help, though, being part of your family. She needs her big sister.’

Louise saw Juliet’s angry face in her mind’s eye. If she thought of that conversation every time she thought of Juliet, she assumed Juliet felt the same. It made her shrink inside, out of cowardice. Presumably Juliet felt the same.

‘And she needs Toby,’ Diane went on. ‘She needs someone to love right now. Someone other than Minton. Bless him, but he won’t ever be able to tell her he loves her back, will he? Be the bigger girl, Louise. Build the bridges.’

‘Fine, I’ll ask her,’ she said. It always came down to
her
.

‘Oh, that makes me feel better,’ said Diane, and Louise couldn’t help wondering if her mother would be quite so bothered if she knew what
she
did about poor, tragic Juliet, and why her two girls – so similar in some ways, so different in others – weren’t really talking.

Coincidentally, Juliet was only a few hundred metres from Louise when she rang, doing her round of the park with Coco, Minton and Hector.

It was amazing, the difference in Hector’s manners, now he had a harness and a walker who gave him instructions, instead of letting him haul her around. He also seemed to have resolved his issues with Minton, and the two of them barrelled along matily ahead of Juliet and Coco, sometimes giving each other a shoulder barge like a couple of lads out on the town.

Juliet was pleased Minton had a friend. Even if he was a friend who might lead her innocent boy into terrible ways, it took some of the pressure off her when it came to amusing him. She didn’t think his current life was anywhere near as entertaining and varied as the one he’d lived at Ben’s side.

Coco plodded away, and Juliet, with Diane’s pedometer, plodded next to her in her lovely protective bubble of Chapter Seventeen of
Emma
. The polite nods of recognition she received from other walkers weren’t unlike the formal relationships going on in her ears. Blonde Wild Dog Café Owner with Red-and-White Basset Hound Called Bertie now beamed in a familiar manner, even if she didn’t know her name, as did retired Man in Flat Cap with Surprisingly Butch Scottie Called Churchill, who actually touched the brim of his cap as he passed.

Life was much more civilised when people had to leave calling cards, thought Juliet, heading out of the park and up the hill towards Coneygreen Woods. It was much easier to be a widow then, too. Widows had a timetable, right down to what clothes they wore to let people know which stage they’d reached in their grieving. And people knew what to say and didn’t come out with stupid, upsetting things like ‘Time is a great healer’ or ‘He had a good innings.’

She stopped as the narrator was suspended, mid-witticism, and the sound of a ringtone cut in. When she wrestled the phone out of her bag and saw it was Louise, not her mother, Juliet’s heart sank a bit, but she answered it anyway.

‘Jools, it’s me.’ Louise sounded bright – and a bit fake. ‘How are
you
?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘What are you up to? Everything OK?’

Juliet rolled her eyes at Hector. She could do without this quiz every time her mother and sister rang. If she was contemplating a razor blade and a bottle of gin, she’d hardly tell them. ‘I’m walking the dogs.’

‘Oh, you’re out! Wonderful! Listen, are you around on Friday night?’

‘No, I’m going to Paris for the night,’ said Juliet. ‘Of course I’m in.’

Already, she could guess where this was headed. Was this another of Louise’s invitations to dinner . . . ‘to meet some new faces’? How many unattached computer nerds could there be in one small town?

‘Would you like to come and spend some time with Toby?’ asked Louise. ‘Peter’s taking me out for dinner.’

The no-date-thanks objections scrolling through Juliet’s mind like screen credits –
I’m not ready; I have nothing to talk about; I’d be betraying Ben
– froze.

Toby? Louise had never asked her to look after Toby before.

And more to the point,
Peter was taking Lou out for dinner?

‘Do you mean, would I like to babysit Toby?’ She tugged Minton back from his eager inspection of a crumpled KFC bag.

There was a pause, and Juliet knew Louise was kicking herself for revealing her hand. Obviously not back on full court form yet, she thought, triumphantly.