Wonder Women (55 page)

‘I should go,' Lee whispered.

‘There's no hurry,' said Miranda. ‘Tomorrow's Saturday. Have another coffee, and then you can pop your two in the car. They don't have to be up early tomorrow, and neither do you.'

He followed her through to the kitchen. She'd loaded her expensive dishwasher and it was humming quietly. The kitchen was immaculate.

‘So how's the book going?' she asked, as she made coffee.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘I think I've got the outline of the story, and I've been experimenting with styles of illustration. I think when I know what it's going to look like, I'll be
able to finalise the words, and then know exactly which illustrations I need to do.'

‘You're just so amazing,' Miranda said, handing him his cappuccino. ‘I don't understand the creative process at all – how you can make something out of nothing. I admire people like you and Holly so much.'

‘Now you're going to make me blush.'

‘No, really, it's a mystery. Tell me more. Can you tell me your idea about the story, or is it a secret?'

He gave her a rough outline, and she asked loads of questions – not, he thought disloyally, the sort of penetrating, hypercritical questions Jo would have asked, but naive questions born of genuine curiosity.

It felt different from their easy conversation of the afternoon – much more intimate, now that it was dark and the children were all asleep. They talked softly, and she sat closer to him than she had that afternoon. Close enough that he could catch the occasional whiff of her perfume, which was something very sweet and floral. Wild rose, maybe.

A silence fell, and he looked up to see Miranda staring into her cup. A shadow crossed her face.

‘You all right?' he asked.

‘Yes.' She managed a small smile. ‘It's just … every now and again, my mum … well, I forget for a moment and then I remember. I know it's supposed to get easier, but at the moment it just seems to be getting worse.'

‘I'm sorry,' Lee said. ‘It must be hard.'

‘It's not even as if we were that close, but she was always there, you know? I felt like I was connected to my family, to my past, to growing up …'

‘And now …?'

‘Well, it's a rite of passage, isn't it? Your last parent dying. It means you're a grown-up.'

‘I hate to point this out, but you're a mum with two kids and a house and a husband … you're a grown-up.' He smiled gently.

‘I know all that,' she said. ‘But none of us really believes we are, do we? We all think we're still teenagers, really.'

He laughed at this. ‘I suppose we do. Although I was the gawkiest teenager – long, skinny legs like bits of spaghetti … and the biggest Afro you ever saw.'

‘I bet you were the coolest kid in town,' she said. ‘I on the other hand …'

‘You?'

‘Holly was always the cool one in our family. I was just … ordinary, you know. The good girl. I went to university and all that, but then I got married, had kids … somehow I thought one day I'd wake up and know what my purpose was. That it would all make sense. But now all the signs show that my life … is what it is.'

‘Is it so bad?'

‘No … No, of course it isn't. It's just Paul – he's never here, and when he is here, he isn't, if you know what I mean. And the kids are great, but they're going to need me less and less, and then where will I be? I'll be my mum, that's who I'll be. A boring beige woman who's never had a day's excitement or mystery in her life.'

‘You don't know that.'

‘No, I do. She was the dullest woman ever. Seriously.'

‘No, I mean about you. You're not dull. You're warm and
lovely and compassionate. Maybe you haven't found your thing yet, but you will. I know you will.'

Miranda smiled, but then the corners of her mouth turned down, like Imi's did when she was about to howl, and she shook her head. ‘Don't be nice to me, unless you want me to cry all over you. Sorry, I'm an emotional mess at the moment. I just wasn't ready … to be an orphan.'

The word ‘orphan' seemed to tip her over the edge, and the tears started to flow. Lee leaned closer and put his arm around her shoulder, and she turned her face into his neck and cried like a child. She was straining awkwardly, so he stood and so did she, so he could hug her properly. She was much shorter than Jo, and although she felt soft, her bones were light and small, like a bird.

He knew it would happen a moment before it did. She turned her wet face up to his. Her mouth found his and she was kissing him hungrily, and he was kissing her back. For a moment, just a moment, he responded instinctively to the warmth and physical contact, but then the thought came roaring into his head like a foghorn: THIS. IS. WRONG. In that first instant, it wasn't the moral transgression that struck him, but the wrongness of the person in his arms. She wasn't tall and lithe. Her lips didn't have that soft springiness he knew so well. Her hands on his shoulders were soft and small, not strong and capable. She wasn't Jo.

He released her and stepped back quickly. ‘No,' he said firmly. ‘Miranda, you're a lovely person, but this is just the worst – wrongest – thing I've ever done. I'm so sorry.'

‘I'm sorry too. So sorry,' she said, and he could see she
was actually trembling. ‘That was a moment of total madness. Please forgive me.'

‘Nothing to forgive, but – look, sorry, I have to go.'

He loaded the kids into their car seats while Miranda stood by the door. She gave a small wave as he drove away. He knew it would be a long time before he spoke to her again.

He got home and carefully carried the sleeping kids in one by one. He tipped them both into the big bed, and gently changed Imi's nappy. She barely stirred. He sat on a chair in the dark bedroom and watched them sleep for an hour. What had he done? What had he risked? He had gambled everything he had, all the treasures of his marriage, his family and his home, on a stupid kiss to make his ego feel better. He could have lost everything. He still might, depending on Jo's reaction when he told her. Not telling her was not an option. He knew she was out at meetings all day, and it was still mid-afternoon in New York, so speaking to her immediately wasn't a possibility. Besides, he needed to think, to process what had happened and what it said about him, and make some changes. Some big changes.

Eleven rain hats. How could any woman need eleven rain hats? Holly thought with exasperation. She had begun going through her mum's things. In Judith's tidy wardrobe she had a jacket or coat for every season – a calf-length woollen winter coat, a light spring mac, a mustard-coloured hip-length jacket for the autumn and so on. In the right-hand pocket of each, Holly found a plastic rain hat, of the type old ladies wear to preserve their ‘hairdo', tightly rolled with an elastic band around it. There was also one in each of Judith's handbags. A total of eleven. Surely, thought Holly, it just didn't rain that much? And it wasn't as if Judith didn't have an umbrella. She had seven of varying types in different locations. She couldn't have got wet since about 1970.

It was no surprise that Judith's affairs were in perfect order – she had made David the executor of her will and he found all the paperwork he needed in a neat folder in her desk. The estate was to be split equally between the three children, with a generous bequest to the church. David, Miranda and Holly had agreed to sell the Ealing house and
split the proceeds, and they had also decided to give a bequest to the hospice and the Macmillan nurses who had made such a difference to Judith's last days. Judith had been prudent with her money and the house was completely paid off, so each of them would be getting a substantial sum once it was sold. Holly hadn't thought about this at all, and it came as quite a shock. From being an itinerant, living half in her mum's house and camping in her barely furnished flat in East Finchley, she would soon become a woman of means, with enough money to put down a big deposit on her own home.

She and Miranda threw themselves into clearing the house. There was thirty years' worth of stuff – not junk, but the thousands of things any family accumulates and never gets around to giving away. They started out sorting items one by one, but as they seemed barely to be making a dent in the mammoth task, they decided to go through the house, take the things they wanted to keep and call a charity that did house-clearances to deal with the rest of it. They both wanted surprisingly little – Miranda because she already had a complete household of her own, and Holly because very little of the stuff was to her taste, and it all seemed tainted with the sadness of her mum's loss. David came and took a few paintings and the old football flags from his boyhood bedroom. He had no intention of helping with the actual clearing, but he was more than happy to pay for the clearance people.

The day the van came, Holly and Miranda both came to the house, but they found it very upsetting to watch the history of their childhoods being carried out of the door
and chucked into a skip. Holly went and spoke to the foreman. She came back to Miranda. ‘He says it'll take them all of today and some of tomorrow. He's happy to carry on without us.'

‘Are you sure it's okay to leave them?'

‘What do you think they're going to do? Steal something? We're trying to get rid of the stuff.'

‘I suppose … I just feel bad, letting them empty Mum's house like this.'

‘Me too. But she doesn't know it's happening, and there's no point in us upsetting ourselves over it. Tell you what – let's go for coffee on the Broadway. Maybe even get a bit of breakfast. We'll come back in an hour or so and see how they're doing.'

As they walked down the road, Holly thought how her relationship with Miranda had changed. Miranda had always been the big sister, the sensible one, and very bossy. But through Judith's illness, Holly had become the practical one who had made all the decisions. Miranda had not been very much use at all. Over the last few months, Holly had got used to telling her what to do, and on the whole, Miranda took her advice. Even though it was all over, she still looked very anxious and sad.

They found a little patisserie and Holly ordered them cappuccinos, and even though Miranda said she wasn't hungry, she got them each a pain au chocolat. She knew about Miranda's sweet tooth, and sure enough, once the pastry was put in front of her, she bit into it with relish. ‘Oh, if I could live on naughty baked goodies, I would,' she said, brushing crumbs from her lips.

‘Well, now you're a woman of means, you can,' said Holly. ‘You could hire your own pastry chef.'

Miranda shook her head. ‘No, I'll need that money, sadly. I can't blow it on frivolities.'

‘What for? Are you and Paul planning to buy somewhere bigger?'

‘Er, no,' said Miranda. And it was clear she was trying to decide whether or not to say something. Holly resisted the urge to bombard her with questions. She sipped at her coffee and waited.

‘The thing is …' Miranda said, ‘well, I suppose I have to tell you sometime. Paul and I are having a trial separation.'

‘What?' said Holly, forgetting her manners. That was the last thing she had expected Miranda to say.

‘He came back from his business trip to Japan, and I said to him I thought we had problems, and that maybe we needed to see a counsellor. He said he thought there were no problems and he was perfectly happy. So I packed his bags and threw him out. Now he realises I'm serious.'

Holly had to stop her mouth from falling open with shock. She couldn't imagine a more unlikely scenario.

‘Losing Mum, and … some other things … well, it made me think,' said Miranda. ‘I don't want to live my life as a single parent when I'm not one, feeling like my husband doesn't even see me, and he just takes me for granted. I don't know what I want, but I know I want more than this.'

‘And so …?'

‘Paul's living in a bedsit near us, and we're seeing a counsellor. I don't know if it's too little too late, but I'll see.'

Holly couldn't help noticing that Miranda had said ‘I'll
see', not ‘we'll see'. It seemed as if she was making a decision just for herself for the first time in a long time.

Miranda wasn't the only one who needed to make some big decisions. Since the night after Judith's death, Holly had spent every night in her flat in East Finchley. She had started to gather more household goods, and it almost looked like a home now, if rather a minimalist one. She loved the sunlit space, and it felt to her like the first proper home she had had in more than a decade. It was her own space, and she liked to be there, quietly and alone, doing her own thing and having the time to figure out exactly what she wanted from life, and what her future might look like.

She tried to throw herself back into work as soon as she could, but she found much had changed at Jungletown. Now things were being run from the premises in Angel, it was an altogether more corporate company. The lines between her responsibilities and those of Gary, the buyer in the main office, weren't always clear, and they had to liaise – and sometimes argue – over everything. The thing was, Jungletown had given her a lifeline at what had been a terrible time for her. It had got her designing again when her confidence was at an all-time low. She'd loved the process of developing the look and feel of the range and getting the first shop up and running, and she was immensely grateful to Jo for cutting her so much slack when her mum was ill. She felt terribly guilty that her heart just wasn't in it any more. She worked as hard as she could, but she kept dreaming of the dresses she would be designing and making if she had the time. She even bought fabric and did some late-night sewing, even though it felt as if she was cheating on Jungletown.
She felt so bad about it that she didn't even tell anyone. She knew that the time was coming when she would have to make some big decisions about her future – she needed to decide what she wanted to do and where she wanted to live. She still wasn't entirely convinced that England was the right place for her. Then something happened that complicated the picture even further.