Three’s a Crowd (19 page)

‘Sure,' she said. ‘I'm going to get another drink.'

In the time that took,
Philosophy Guy
had sent back an actual written message. Catherine read it out to her.

His name was Phil, hence the moniker; he liked her photo, he said she had a nice smile; he worked in IT, which he found quite stimulating. Rachel was not exactly bowled over, but at least he used correct spelling and punctuation, Catherine pointed out.

She proceeded to act as scribe, as all three of them composed a reply, which ended up sounding more like an interrogation.

He gave some sketchy answers, claiming it was difficult to get to know someone over email. There was a little more to-ing and fro-ing, but Rachel lost interest, so she left Catherine to deal with him. By the time the second bottle was finished, Rachel had a date for the following Friday night.

‘That happened really fast,' she said, her head spinning, though that could be attributed to the champagne.

‘Damn straight,' Catherine said proudly. ‘If I keep going at this rate, I'll have a job for you by next week, Lexie.'

‘What would you think if I went back to work, Mum?'

‘Lexie!' Her mother looked up from the stack of sheets she was searching through. They had embarked on their annual post-Christmas sales expedition. Her mother always waited a polite interval, at least until the first week in January; rushing to the shops before that was simply vulgar, she maintained. Lexie used to enjoy these trips, the buzz finding designer labels at a fraction of their pre-Christmas price. But after a while she started to wonder why a dress selling for eighty dollars could ever have been worth five hundred.

These days she just wondered where everyone got the money. Weren't they absolutely bled dry after Christmas, like her and Scott? And the level of frenzy seemed, well, a little vulgar as well. Not that her mother ever behaved in a frenzied manner. She always had a plan and a very specific list, which she rarely strayed from. It wasn't a bargain, she had always told Lexie, if you didn't need it in the first place. So it was the time of the year she replaced or topped up her linen, flatware and glassware, and began to stock up on gifts for the coming year.

‘Why, darling,' she was saying, ‘do you want to know if I can mind the children? Because I'd be only too thrilled. We'd have to work it around some of my commitments, but I'm sure it can be done, and honestly, anything to help. Your father and I have been so worried.'

Lexie's face dropped.

‘What's the matter?'

‘You're pleased?' she said. ‘I was hoping you'd be horrified, or at least disapproving that I'd leave the kids so young.' If she wasn't even going to get support from her mother's generation, where would she get it?

Sally looked at her daughter's crestfallen face. ‘Let's take these to the register. I think it's time for coffee.'

Twenty minutes later they were ensconced at a table at a nearby café, and Mia was occupied with her babycino. Lexie had not dragged Riley along today. Mia was still young enough to go in
the stroller, but it would be unfair to expect poor Riley to trudge around behind them all day, so she had arranged a play date with a friend from his preschool, who was starting big school with him at the end of the month.

‘So what's this all about?' Sally asked her daughter. ‘Why did you ambush me with that question?'

‘I didn't ambush you, Mum.'

‘Lexie, there was obviously an agenda attached. And as I was not informed of that agenda, I gave you an honest answer instead of telling you what you wanted to hear.'

Lexie sighed. ‘I didn't mean to ambush you, Mum. I thought you wouldn't approve of me going back to work, and I wanted someone to be on my side.'

Sally frowned. ‘Okay, I'm still not following you. What exactly are you talking about?'

‘It's just been . . . suggested to me, by some quarters, that with Riley going to school this year, I should think about going back to work.'

‘This is coming from Scott?'

‘No, of course not!' she insisted.

‘Well, it's not exactly a crazy idea, darling.'

‘But you stayed home, Mum, for all three of us. And not just till we went to school.'

Her mother, in fact, had never had a ‘job', according to Catherine's criteria, because she'd never been paid for the tireless work she did for various charities and organisations.

‘It was different for me,' said Sally. ‘Your father had a good income, darling, a very good income. You know that. And the hours he worked made it almost impossible for me to consider working.'

‘It's the same with Scott.'

She thought her mother was going to choke on her latte.

‘I just mean his hours are difficult to work around,' Lexie explained. She knew the income was no comparison. ‘The early starts, weekends . . .'

‘Weekends aren't really the issue though, are they, sweetheart?' her mother pointed out. ‘It just means he has a day off during the week when he could be with the children if you were working.'

‘But then we'd get no family time at all.'

‘That is a good point,' Sally agreed. ‘And something to be taken into account, certainly. Do you remember how difficult it was with your father?' She shook her head. ‘No matter how carefully we scheduled birthday parties and family get-togethers, some woman would always go into labour at the most inconvenient time.'

‘I finshed Gammar,' Mia announced.

‘I'll get her –'

‘No, no,' Sally waved her off. Lexie sat back, sipping her coffee, watching as her mother gently and lovingly, and always so patiently, cleaned up her granddaughter, then lifted her over onto her lap and let her rest her head against her pale cashmere cardigan and play with her necklace. It was only costume jewellery; that was one lesson Sally had learned early on, when Riley had closed his little fist around a string of antique pearls she was wearing, and tugged. The entire family had spent the next hour on their hands and knees, searching for the pearls, which had scattered into every corner of the room. An errant pearl showed up every so often for probably the next six months.

Of course at the time her mother had dismissed it. She was always so patient, so forgiving and understanding of the little mishaps – and not so little ones – that children were prone to cause. Lexie's childhood had been idyllic for the most part. It was true, they didn't see an awful lot of their father, but she understood very early on that babies didn't arrive politely during business hours. It wasn't his fault, he wasn't putting his job before his family and neglecting them; he'd certainly prefer not to have to drag himself out of bed at three in the morning in the middle of winter to stand in a room while a baby virtually delivered itself. But that's what he had to do, so that he was there on the occasions when things were not so easy or straightforward, when the fate of a baby or its mother depended on his expertise, when his presence in the room was the difference between a happy ending and a tragic one.

So her mother had to be the rock of the family, the centre. And she performed her role so well that it was all that Lexie wanted to do when she grew up. Despite her expensive private-school
education, despite her better than average results, she did not want to follow Monica or Eric into medicine. Family pressure, albeit gently applied, made it impossible for her not to at least try. She'd never actually told anyone that she didn't want to be a doctor, so how were they supposed to know? Lexie didn't like to let anyone down, so she dutifully enrolled in a Bachelor of Medical Science and dutifully kept her grades up so that she would be eligible for the postgraduate medicine program. And then she walked into Scott's café. Lexie would never forget the day she first laid eyes on Scott, working behind the counter in the open kitchen, tall and gorgeous, with a smile that had simply turned her insides liquid. There was no other way to describe it. He still did it to her to this day.

So Lexie did not take up the offer she received in the new year to proceed to Medicine; instead her bachelor degree qualified her for a position as an assistant in a medical lab. Her parents were stunned, to say the least, and although Lexie insisted it had nothing to do with meeting Scott, and that she'd never wanted to do medicine anyway, she knew they would always believe that she had simply fallen in love and lost all perspective. Which was why Scott was so sensitive around them. They were always polite to him, unfailingly, but he wasn't stupid, and he knew how it must have looked to them. He'd tried to talk Lexie into continuing with her studies, but she managed to convince him at least that it was genuinely not what she wanted to do. Still he remained tentative about the future, not daring to suggest that they might actually have one together until he felt he could offer her the kind of future that would meet with her parents' approval. So Lexie had had to be the one to propose, or she would have been waiting a long time.

And now she was blissfully married, with two beautiful children, and the only thing that could make her happier would be to have more beautiful children. And to be able to be with them full-time while they were little, and take them to the park, and play make-believe, and walk them to school, and cut the crusts off their little sandwiches, and never miss a single moment.

She gazed wistfully across at her mother. ‘I want to be like you, Mum.'

Sally looked up from Mia. ‘Well, that's one of the nicest things anyone could ever say.'

‘But it's true. I want to be a good mother, just like you.'

‘You are a wonderful mother, Lexie,' Sally assured her, ‘and I'm so very proud of you. But times have changed. Even if your father had had an average-paying job, I still probably wouldn't have gone out to work. Houses were so much more affordable. It's so difficult for young couples now, I don't know how they manage. Most women have to work, whether they want to or not. In a lot of cases they want to, and that's fine too. You know, when I was at the planning meeting for the breast cancer benefit the other day, there were so many little toddlers running about, someone said we might have to think about organising a creche. It was just like years ago, running the fundraising committees for the school and the like, when we all had our own children underfoot. Now it's the grandchildren.'

She sighed contentedly, gazing down at Mia, and Lexie accepted she wasn't going to get the kind of support she was hoping for, although she did appreciate the kind of support her mother was only too happy to give.

‘I've been meaning to ask,' said Sally. ‘How is Tom next door, and the girls? You haven't mentioned him lately.' She shook her head sadly. ‘Poor man, I think of him often, losing that beautiful wife. And the girls, losing their mother! It doesn't bear thinking about.'

Lexie replaced her cup in its saucer. ‘They only got back yesterday. You know they've been up the coast nearly the whole time since the funeral?' Lexie paused with a tremulous little sigh. ‘I went in this morning with a casserole, but he said I shouldn't bring any more.'

Tom had explained that Sophie was going through a vegetarian phase, ‘and Hannah and I just can't keep up. There's still some in the freezer, from . . . you know, before we went away.'

‘I just want to help, Tom.'

‘I know you do.' He had smiled down at her. ‘But you've got enough on your plate with your own kids. And you've been great, Lexie, I really appreciate it. But we're doing fine. Really.'

Lexie sighed now. ‘I feel like he's keeping up a brave face for us
all. I wish I could just get him to open up, I want him to feel free to be able to talk about it. But I don't know how to approach it. I can't keep taking him food now that he's specifically asked me not to, but it's a bit forward for me to invite him in for a cup of coffee, like I would Annie.'

‘Exactly,' Sally agreed. ‘You can't treat him the way you would a girlfriend, it's not appropriate, and I daresay it would only make him feel uncomfortable.' She paused, thinking. ‘Why not get Scott to ask him down to the pub for a drink?'

‘Pardon?'

‘He'd probably feel more comfortable talking to a man, over a beer. It's what they do.'

‘I don't go to the pub,' said Scott that evening, ‘and I don't think Tom's much into the pub scene either.'

‘There's a scene?' asked Lexie. ‘You have to be “in” it, you can't just go occasionally?'

Scott sighed, stretching his legs out in front of him. They were sitting outside, after dinner, letting the kids have a bit of a run around in the fresh air before they put them to bed. It was too hot inside.

‘I wonder where all the Christmas beetles have gone?' Scott mused.

‘Christmas is over.'

‘No, I haven't noticed them around this year. They used to be everywhere when we were kids, remember?'