The Accidental Mother (5 page)

“For two weeks?” Gillian asked, with amusement.

Obviously Sophie had said something funny, but she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. “Yeah, you know, from an agency or something,” She said uncertainly.

“It seems a little extreme, Sophie, for a few days. If that’s all it is really going to be, the company won’t grind to a halt without you, you know.”

The comment could not have stung Sophie more if Gillian had leaped over her solid oak desk and slapped her across the face.

“I know!” Sophie said with a little brittle laugh. “But I’m just in the middle of some important projects right now, especially the Madison Corporation ship party. That’s coming up really soon, and there is heaps left to do, even though we are completely on top of it, of course…”

“Of course,” Gillian said, smiling wryly.

“So, I mean, I will take it as vacation, but I’ll just keep working too, if that’s okay.”

Gillian seemed to mull the proposition over, and Sophie wondered, not for the first time, how it was that Gillian managed to wear chic little chiffon neck scarves loosely tied at her shoulder without them constantly coming undone like Sophie’s did whenever she had tried it. Perhaps she glues them on, Sophie thought.

“Look,” Gillian said at last. “I appreciate your dedication, Sophie. It doesn’t go unnoticed. But I wonder if you realize what you are taking on. Let’s play it by ear. If things change or you find it too much to do both, then Eve can always step in—”

“No!” Sophie interrupted her and instantly regretted it. It was like interrupting the queen. “Sorry, Gillian, I just meant that I can handle it. No one needs to step in. It’s only fourteen days, and that includes two weekends!”

“You normally work weekends, don’t you?” Gillian said.

“Well, sometimes…,” Sophie said, wondering why she was being made to feel guilty just for being dedicated. “My point is, it’s not for very long. How hard can it be?”

F
or the first ten minutes of the taxi ride to Mrs. Stiles’s house, Sophie and Tess did not speak to each other.

Sophie was too busy fretting about the looks on Lisa’s and Cal’s faces when she had told them what was happening and wondering what the implications of those looks were. They were like theatrical masks. Lisa’s face had been the tragic one, and Cal’s had been pure comedy. He’d neatly glossed over the whole dead-mother-of-two element to see the funny side and to give Sophie a rundown of all the hilariously calamitous events that were bound to befall them.

“Look,” Tess said, breaking the silence as the cab turned onto Upper Street. “I think you are doing an incredible thing here, I really do, and I want you to know I’ll be there to help you. It’s not as if you’re on your own.”

Sophie half-smiled at her. “Thanks,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and looking out the window. The record shop where she and Carrie had spent so much time peeping at boys over the tops of Stone Roses LPs had long since been replaced by a cell phone shop. “I want to help, I really do. I might not have come across like I did, but I do. It was just the surprise of it all. You know, it all happened so quickly, for me anyway.”

“I know,” Tess said, studying her profile. “That was my fault. I did bungle it a bit. It’s not like me at all. I’ve never worked on a case like this before.” She held out a hand to Sophie, who turned and looked at it. “Let’s try to work together, try to do something good for these children—okay?”

Sophie nodded and shook her hand. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’ll give it my best shot.”

Mrs. Stiles’s house, her life, and a large part of Sophie’s past had already been packed away. There were several crates in the hallway marked “Storage,” and a host of cardboard boxes stacked against any available wall space. The house where Sophie had spent so many hours, laughing and plotting and dreaming with Carrie had been swept away, leaving only faint shadows and outlines to prove that it had ever been there. Even Mrs. Stiles herself had faded to the point where she was almost translucent.

When Sophie had seen her at the christening, she had been looking older and tired, but the last three years seemed to have shrunk her away almost to nothing. She was inches shorter, and her skin was papery thin and gray.

“Mrs. Stiles,” Sophie said. “I just couldn’t believe it when I heard. I’m so sorry.”

Mrs. Stiles nodded and gestured for Sophie to sit down on the same beige velour sofa that she and Carrie had giggled on the night of the christening and countless times before that as girls. “We tried so long for Caroline, her dad and I,” she said. “Everyone else was having baby after baby except me. Five years went by, then it was fifteen, and I thought it just wasn’t meant to be. It wasn’t in Jesus’ plan, you see. When she came, I was so unprepared that I thought it was the change! She was my miracle. My gift.” Mrs. Stiles’s smile faded. “I don’t why loving her so much wasn’t enough. I don’t know why she went away, why she let that…
man
”—she spit out the word—“ruin her life just like her father ruined mine.” She coughed and gagged as if she might choke on her bitterness. “And now the lives of those poor children too. Everything that has happened to them has happened because of
him.
If he’d been at home like he should have been, supporting his family, Carrie wouldn’t have been driving that death trap.” She stopped talking abruptly and caught her breath. “I just feel so angry, all of this,
all
of this is his fault.”

Sophie did not know quite what to say, so she said nothing and listened to the house, perfectly quiet except for the ticking of a clock.

“Where
are
the children?” she asked eventually.

“Upstairs,” Mrs. Stiles said. “I told them to wait there and not make a peep until we were ready for them. They’re no trouble, you know, as long as they know who’s boss. They packed all their bits. They don’t have too much with them, just a big suitcase between them—almost everything is still in Carrie’s house—there’s been no one really to sort it out. The neighbor’s been good, keeping an eye on it—but there’s so much that needs doing. I didn’t think I would have to do it—” She reached out and took Sophie’s hand in hers. Her skin felt dry and rough.

“I just can’t do it,” she said, and Sophie knew she was talking about the children.

“I know,” she said.

“Well,” Mrs. Stiles said with a sharp edge to her voice. “I always said to Carrie that you were the sensible one. And now look.”

Sophie sat back in her chair and withdrew her fingers from Mrs. Stiles’s hand. She had expected her to be upset but not angry.

“Ms. Andrew, call the girls down, will you?” Mrs. Stiles said.

Sophie swallowed hard and counted the last seconds of her foreseeable freedom as footsteps thundered down the stairs, the living room door flew open, and a small child flung herself into Sophie’s lap with some considerable impetus, winding her momentarily.

“Goodness, child, slow down,” Mrs. Stiles said, but the child in question ignored her and flung her arms around Sophie’s neck. At first Sophie thought it was Bella, but then she saw Bella standing in the doorway and realized that this must be Izzy in her lap, resplendent in a lilac fairy costume complete with wings and a glittery net skirt.

The child kissed Sophie wetly on the cheek and patted her head fondly. “My mommy’s car is broken,” she said. “There was a
bang
and a man in a van, and it’s broken now, it’s in the garage. I don’t like cars, do I? Have you got any chocolate birthday cake? Are you three or seven today?”

Sophie looked at her. “Um,” she said.

Bella crossed the room and gave Izzy a sisterly look of disapproval. Sophie thought she saw a trace of Carrie in the expression, just a trace among the dark good looks Bella must have inherited from their father. Izzy clearly resembled her mother, who was fair-skinned and whose light brown hair was almost a honey blond.

“Shut up, Izzy,” Bella said. “She’s much older than seven, idiot.” Bella held out her hand, and Sophie took it and shook it, still struggling to find something appropriate to say.

“I like your boots,” Bella said. “I like pink, it’s my favorite color.”

Sophie smiled at the girls. “Me too,” she said.

“Me too!” shouted Izzy, causing Mrs. Stiles to wince. A passion for chocolate and an eye for shoes. Maybe she did have something in common with the girls after all. A shame then, Sophie thought as she smiled fixedly at the girls, that she felt as if she were having her very life pulled inside out by an overwhelming vacuum of fear.

“Right then,” Tess said, gathering up the reams of papers she had laid out across Sophie’s blond ash coffee table. “I’ll be off. See you tomorrow, girls.”

“Bye, Tess,” both girls sang absently, mesmerized by something Tess had found for them to watch on TV involving huge multicolored puppets and a lot of shouting.

“Off?” Sophie said anxiously. “Off where?” They had been back at her place for less than two hours, in which Sophie had seen a small, quite neat flat transformed into a jumble sale of dirty, multicolored clothes. Tess had suggested that, when she had time, Sophie might clear the girls a drawer, but in the meantime, she helped them sort out what was clean and what wasn’t, refolded what she could neatly into the suitcase, and loaded the rest into Sophie’s washing machine. Sophie, who was more of a dry-clean-only sort of girl, rarely used her washing machine. When it had juddered and shaken its way into a final spin, Sophie had jumped out of her skin.

“Where do you have to go
now
?” Sophie repeated her anxious question.

“Oh, you know, work,” Tess said. “It’s almost four, Sophie. I have to get all this signed, sealed, and, er, delivered tonight.”

“But so soon? I mean, do you think I’m ready?”

Tess smiled at her and dumped the sheaf of papers into her sequined patchwork tote bag seemingly without the vaguest concern over tears or dog-ears.

“You said before in the cab that you’d help me, that I wasn’t alone!” Sophie said tremulously.

“I know,” Tess said. “And I meant it, but I can’t move in. If I could, we wouldn’t have this problem. There are other people out there who need me, plus a load of paperwork that needs doing. The law makes a special provision for cases like yours. I’ll be at a night court until late arranging your residency order.” Tess looked around the flat, the second floor of a converted Georgian town house, and tucked one chin into another as she smiled at Sophie. “Look, you have nice flat. Obviously a little too small for an adult and two children, what with only one bedroom and no garden, but on the whole I’m satisfied. It will do for now. And the girls seem to have settled in okay. I think they’re getting used to moving around, poor mites. You’ll be fine.”

Sophie looked at the girls. What Tess said was right—she had expected them to be Dickensian waifs, thin and pale and red-eyed. But they seemed to be handling this with much more presence of mind that she was, and they
had
been very manageable since they left Mrs. Stiles’s. It must be, Sophie thought, because they don’t really understand what’s happening. Perhaps they are too young to really feel the loss and upheaval.

Sophie had thought there would be tears when they said good-bye to their grandmother, but the girls hadn’t seemed too sorry to leave her. Mrs. Stiles had told them she would see them soon and to keep their chins up, and both of them did, literally in Izzy’s case, causing her to walk into the gatepost at the bottom of the garden path. If there had been any hint of tears, it might have been from Mrs. Stiles, who had pressed her lips so firmly together as she watched the girls leave that her mouth had turned pale and bloodless. She’d shut the door before they had closed the garden gate behind them.

Miraculously, Sophie had seen a black cab turn in to the street and had stepped out to the curb to hail it, but just as the cabbie caught her eye, Tess had pulled her back onto the pavement and waved the driver on; he’d sworn through the glass at the pair of them and shaken his head with irritation.

“What’s the problem?” Sophie had asked Tess. “Was it money? Because I was going to pay—my place is a long walk from here, you know. I didn’t think these two could walk that far. Short legs and all that.” Sophie had looked at the battered and brimming suitcase at her feet. “And this is heavy.”

Tess had shaken her head.

“Oh look, girls!” she’d exclaimed. “Ants!” Astonishingly, the discovery had seemed to delight both girls, who’d crouched over the crack in the pavement and watched the busy insects track and bustle across the stone slab. After a moment Bella had started to give the ants tiny tinny voices, commenting on their every movement, making Izzy chuckle, her small shoulders shaking.

Sophie had raised a questioning eyebrow at Tess. “I didn’t think we’d be stopping for a natural history lesson,” she’d said.

Tess had taken a step closer to Sophie and lowered her voice. “I told you Izzy is still a bit iffy about cars,” she’d said. “After the crash.”

“Oh.” Sophie had forgotten that piece of information. “When you say
iffy,
what do you mean exactly—she can’t go in cabs at all? Because I didn’t think she’d know, you know, that her mum had been killed in a car crash. I didn’t think she really got that her mum was killed. I mean, she seems pretty happy.”

Tess had chewed her lip. “I obviously didn’t make myself clear,” she’d begun ominously. “Izzy was in the car when Carrie was killed. A van going fifty hit them on the driver’s side at an intersection. Izzy was in a car seat. She was protected. Frightened and alone for almost ten minutes until help came, but physically unhurt. Carrie’s seat belt was faulty. Apparently she knew it was, she just hadn’t got around to getting it fixed. She was killed outright. Thrown from the car. So Izzy’s a bit iffy about getting in cars, including cabs, I’m afraid.”

Sophie had looked down the length of the tree-lined road that she and Carrie had walked along so many times together talking incessantly—making plans, creating dreams for themselves. Carrie was going to be a painter, of course, and a fashion designer. She was going to live right by the sea in a tower and marry a fisherman. Sophie was going to become a vet and run a cat sanctuary. She was going to marry Jason Donovan. It was funny how Carrie’s dream never changed and how she had made it more or less come true. Sophie’s plans changed from year to year: different occupation, different celebrity husband, until her dreams and fantasies had faded away into real solid ambition, into her life as it stood now. Even now, even knowing exactly what she wanted and exactly where she was going, Sophie assumed she had enough time left on the earth to make it happen. But Carrie had never planned to be thrown from a car and killed taking her daughter to nursery school. Neither one of them had ever dreamed she’d die. Not now, not ever.

“Does she understand what happened then?” Sophie had asked. To be perfectly honest, Sophie had no idea what three-year-olds could or could not understand. If she’d ever thought about it before that day, and she never had, she would have guessed they had about the same amount of reasoning power as the average dog—maybe a collie or a German shepherd—and much less than a cat.

Tess had shrugged. “She understands that it was very frightening and that she hasn’t seen her mummy since. I’m not sure what else she understands. I haven’t really had time to talk to either of them properly. I don’t think anyone has. Like I mentioned before, I’ve got both girls down for counseling, but, well, there’s a waiting list.” For a second Sophie had not known what to say, and she’d felt the weight of the children’s terrible loss nudging at her edges. She’d blinked hard and chased the feeling away. There was no time for that now, she’d told herself. Right now she needed to stay focused on the project at hand.