The Accidental Family (29 page)

“I assumed that as my best friend you wouldn’t tell anyone, because generally friends keep each other’s secrets,” Sophie chided him. “I’ve always kept your secrets.”

“I never have any secrets,” Cal protested. “And anyway, you can’t have a go at me. I need your help. You heard Eve, she wants me out and you in!”

Sophie’s expression softened and she pushed the bowl of fries they were sharing over to Cal. “It’s not that bad. Eve wants you on your toes, she wants you to feel anxious, as if your job might be on the line—that’s her management style. But you heard her, she needs good people, and even if you rub her the wrong way, results show that you are doing well. If she tried to get rid of you, she’d be shooting herself in the foot and she knows it.”

“So you’re saying I just have to put up with her hating me?” Cal asked miserably before stuffing a fistful of fries into his mouth.

“Endure,” Sophie advised. “If I know Eve, some other poor soul will fall under her Medusa gaze soon enough. And this time it might be someone she could actually get rid of. So what if she makes your life a misery? As long as you keep on doing your job as well as you are, she can’t touch you.”

“Oh god.” Cal’s head thumped down on the tabletop. “I’m not made to endure life. I’m made to enjoy it! I don’t know if I can take it. I never thought I’d say this—but I miss the days when I was your secretary and the most work I ever did was reading
Hello!
magazine.”

“You don’t mean that, Cal.” Sophie smiled. “This is your career, your job—the thing that defines you and your future. Success doesn’t come easy. You need to pay with blood, sweat, and pain.”

Cal’s forehead found its place on the tabletop once more.

That night Sophie shut herself away in her old room and resolved to call Louis. After all, now she had a reason to phone him, a solid,
concrete, and rational reason that wasn’t purely about her wanting to hear the sound of his voice and hoping that he missed her. She wanted to talk to him about Bella’s threatening to sneak out of school and secretly taking Louis’s phone to call her. She steeled herself as she listened to the dial tone, which rang for longer than the normal four it took to get Louis to pick up. When the phone was finally answered, it wasn’t Louis’s voice Sophie heard.

“Hello?” Wendy said. Sophie resisted the urge to instantly hang up. Knowing that her name would have come up on Louis’s phone, she didn’t want Wendy to know that her answering Louis’s phone had rattled her in any way.

“Hi, Wendy,” Sophie said in an even tone, using the other woman’s name to show that she wasn’t remotely bothered. “Can you get Louis for me please?”

“Sorry, he’s …a bit tied up at the moment,” Wendy said, deliberately vague. Sophie glanced at her watch. In all likelihood Louis was with the girls, probably giving them a bath or reading them a story. It was just Wendy’s tone and her own imagination that led her to picture him tied naked to the radiator in the living room while Wendy toyed with him. “I’ll tell him you called.”

“Thank you,” Sophie said. “And please tell him it’s important.”

“Of course it is,” Wendy said before disconnecting the call.

Sophie waited until midnight for Louis to phone back, but the call never came. Which either meant he didn’t want to talk to her or Wendy hadn’t given him her message. Sophie considered ringing him again, but the thought of hearing Wendy’s voice kept her from doing so. It looked like she’d have to wait for him to contact her after all.

For the rest of the week Sophie lived her old life, except that it now included sleeping late because she didn’t go to work every day, although she did meet Cal at the office for lunch. She shopped for
clothes that were entirely inappropriate for a seaside town in winter, taking her neglected credit card out for a spree around the West End. She went with Cal to a poetry reading in a bookstore on Charing Cross Road. She spent ninety pounds in her favorite Covent Garden salon having her hair shaped and styled, leaving the stylist a ten-pound tip even though she’d just paid ninety pounds for her hair to basically look the same. And in a fit of nostalgia for her much missed flat, she made an impromptu call to check on her tenant.

She called in the middle of the day hoping that the new occupant would be out and that she could just let herself in with the keys she still had, have a nose around, perhaps make herself a cup of tea, sit on the sofa, listen to the traffic stream by, and remember when her life was a flat horizon with nothing on it at all.

The tenant, a Miss Mary Harding, had the day off. She was not pleased to see Sophie at all, reminding her that she was supposed to give twenty-four hours’ notice if she wanted to visit and letting her in the front door barely long enough for Sophie to see that her living room had been painted a dark plum color and that a green throw now obscured her lovely sofa before Mary Harding all but threw her out again, telling her she was expecting visitors. Back outside, Sophie sat on the very step where she had found Louis waiting for her all those months ago. She had never dreamed that that moment would lead to this one.

As Friday approached, she noticed two things acutely. Jake had not called her and asked her out to lunch as he had promised and she had heard nothing at all from her fiancé.

Sophie wondered how it was possible to go from feeling like the most wanted and loved woman in the world to feeling like an incidental irritation in the life of someone she had almost given up everything for. She knew that her old life, her comfortable, closed-off city life, was still here for her, that she could even have her old
job back if Eve was really serious. But the problem was, now that she’d had her space and time to think things over, Sophie discovered she didn’t want it anymore.

“Coffee?” Iris asked Sophie as she emerged from her bedroom just past eleven, almost a week after she’d arrived in London. “Come on, you need to get something hot inside you or else you’ll waste away.”

Sophie shook her head; she had been grateful for the opportunity to sleep late over the past week but found it was taking her much longer to wake up than usual. Her head felt fuzzy and she felt more tired and muddled now than she had when she went to bed. It didn’t help having her mother fussing over her and forcing her to eat breakfast for fear she might become anorexic, unless, of course, she asked for a bacon sandwich, in which case her mother’s concern would turn to the dangers of obesity while several smelly dogs milled about her legs. This morning though, the merest thought of bacon turned Sophie’s stomach. In fact, the idea of breakfast in general turned her off completely, which was most unlike her.

Iris waved a coffeepot under Sophie’s nose as she entered the kitchen, which was exactly the same as it had been when she’d left home, the walls lined with pine tongue and groove except for one that was covered with pearlescent wallpaper that shimmered in the morning sun and hurt Sophie’s eyes. Sophie backed away from it and slumped into a chair.

“Got any decaf, Mum?” She yawned, burying her head in her hands.

“Decaf?” Iris asked her bowed head. “You always said decaf was for losers who wanted to pay for coffee-flavored water. I thought you’d want the real stuff after another night out. What was it you and Cal went to see, some Russian play? I never had Cal down as a Russian-play fan.”

“He’s not, but he is the fan of a Russian-play fan,” Sophie said, wondering exactly how she had let Cal persuade her to be the third wheel on his first date with an existential poet just in case it turned out that dark curls and brooding eyes weren’t enough to keep him amused and he had to make a quick escape.

“And yes, I did hear you come in, thank you very much.”

“Well, it wasn’t as if I was singing at the top of my voice or crashing around,” Sophie said petulantly. “I was as sober as a judge. All this stress has made me go off drinking, and it’s not bloody ironic, it’s bloody inconvenient. I mean, that’s what we British do when things don’t go well. We drink ourselves into oblivion and make ill-advised choices. Now I’m being forced, against my will, I might add, to think things through with a clear and rational mind. Although I’m not so sure about the rational bit …”

“You weren’t drinking and you haven’t had coffee once this week?” Iris asked thoughtfully, still holding the coffeepot.

“No, Mum.” Sophie sighed wearily, feeling as if she was seventeen again. “But you don’t have to worry. Neither of those things is a classic sign of an eating disorder. If anything, they show that I am super healthy. Apart from my cream tea and choux pastry addiction, and frankly, when you live in the West Country, that’s practically a requirement.” Sophie looked around the kitchen that was mutt free, except for Tripod, her mother’s three-legged Spaniel cross who’d been injured in a collision with a bus, and was now happily grazing from a buffet of dog bowls left unguarded for a few blissful moments.

“Where are all the dogs anyway?”

“The ones that can be trusted not to dig up next door’s dead gerbil are in the garden and I corralled Scooby and the others in the living room,” Iris said. “I thought we should talk alone.”

“I might be mistaken, but I think talking in front of dumb animals does qualify as talking alone,” Sophie said.

“Those dogs understand every word I say and some of them are very sensitive. Little Miss Pickles knows immediately if there’s something amiss, and her hair falls out. I will not be responsible for a bald Pekingese. Besides, you talk to that cat of yours.”

“Yes, but Artemis is not a dumb animal,” Sophie said. “And anyway, what about Tripod?”

“Tripod is deaf,” Iris replied as she searched her cupboards until she pulled out a packet of herbal tea. “I’ve got peppermint tea.” She squinted at the box over the top of her glasses. “It was best before 2002, but I shouldn’t think it will kill you. Do you fancy that?”

“Peppermint tea; do you know, that’s exactly what I fancy,” Sophie said, brightening up. “I didn’t know I liked peppermint tea.”

Iris pursed her lips and put the kettle on.

“How about poached eggs for breakfast?” she offered her daughter.

“Poached eggs? No thanks, the thought of egg yolks makes me feel like throwing up. I’ll just have some toast, thanks …”

Iris set a mug of steaming peppermint tea down in front of Sophie and sat opposite her at the table.

“Listen, Sophie,” she said. “I haven’t really had a chance to talk to you properly since you got here, what with me getting to know Trevor and you shopping for England. You and I need some mother-daughter time, but you hardly ever seem to be at home and when you are you’re usually asleep. Still, I want you to know that I am here for you and I know you wouldn’t have come back unless it was really serious.”

“It’s okay, Mum.” Sophie smiled at her as she embraced her mug of tea, cupping it with both hands. “I didn’t come here expecting you to fix all my problems. It’s just really good to know that I’ve got a place to come to if I need it. And I think it’s great that you are seeing this Trevor fellow …” Sophie trailed off, feeling
slightly nauseous again. “Anyway, I’m really glad you’re happy. I’m really glad you’ve found someone. He sounds like a lovely man.”

“And he’s dishy too,” Iris assured her, a youthful bloom coloring her cheeks. “So talk to me, darling. I’m all ears.”

Sophie studied her mother’s Formica tabletop, an array of seventies-style flowers spiraling in various shades of orange across its surface. When she was a little girl, she had sat at this very table, discovering faces, creatures, and sometimes entire other worlds in that pattern while her parents talked over her head. Her dad used to say she was always away with the fairies. Her dad also used to make a smiling face out of bacon and tomatoes and put the plate under her nose, making her laugh out loud. For a second, sitting in this kitchen, at this relic of her youth, the memory of her father was so strong that it almost felt as if he were standing beside her; Sophie suddenly missed him with a strength she hadn’t experienced in the longest time, tears tracking down her cheeks.

“Oh, sweetheart, is it really that bad?” her mother asked her, rubbing her shoulders vigorously.

“I don’t know—it’s not even that I’m crying about. I just thought about Dad and that set me off. I’m just a mess at the moment, Mum, it’s like someone peeled away a layer of my skin and I’m feeling everything just a bit more than I used to. I’m bursting into tears at the drop of a hat, making life-changing decisions without thinking about them. I’m very confused.”

“Well, this thing with Louis’s son and his mother must have made you feel unsure,” Iris told her. “Any woman would feel odd about her prospective husband’s secret child turning up out of the blue even if he is twenty years old, didn’t you say?”

Sophie nodded, thinking of Seth, distraught on Mrs. Alexander’s sofa. She had failed him instead of helping him. All she’d done was make a difficult situation even more confusing and difficult
for him. She barely knew him, it was true, but somehow Sophie felt he’d spent a lot of his life covering up for how lost and confused he was really feeling. It was something in his eyes that she recognized. Something she used to see in her own eyes whenever she looked in the mirror.

“And from what you’ve said, this Wendy doesn’t seem like the most sensible of women, trying to come between you and Louis when she should be worrying about her son.”

“She just hates me, that’s what it is,” Sophie explained. “She’s got it into her head that she hates me and that she wants to take Louis from me and it is crazy. It’s even crazier that she thinks I feel threatened by her. Louis likes her, I can see that—she was really important to him once. And he’s trying to work out the best way to deal with discovering that he’s got a son, but he wouldn’t just drop everything we have for her, would he?”

“No. No, I can’t believe that he would. He is sure, isn’t he?” Iris asked her.

“Sure about what?”

“That this Seth is his son. He knows that for sure?”

“Well, he hasn’t done a DNA test or anything, but you should see Seth, Mum. He looks almost exactly like Louis. A little smoother, a touch rounder in the face—but other than that …well, they have to be related.”