The Accidental Mother (9 page)

“Izzy wet the bed,” she said a little anxiously. “It wasn’t me.”

Sophie felt the damp of the fairy dress skirt begin to seep through her pajama bottoms. She didn’t doubt Bella, all the evidence supported her case. Sophie took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to get stressed about it. It was just wee on her leg. It wouldn’t kill her. It probably wouldn’t kill her, although she might have to look that up on the Internet just to make sure. She’d just have to get changed, put these pajamas in the laundry hamper, and buy a new bed after they’d gone, that’s all. And new bedclothes and a new sofa and new cushions and new rugs. She wondered if the presence of a dead friend’s children was an acceptable risk on her homeowners insurance. If it wasn’t, it should have been.

Sophie lifted Izzy off her lap and sat her on the fragrant pile of sheets, where she could do the least damage.

“Okay,” she said to both girls. “Only thirteen days to go.” Both children stared blankly at her. “What I mean is, I have no food in the house. We’ll have to go out for breakfast. Luckily, there’s a twenty-four-hour Sainsbury’s at Manor House. We’ll get dressed. We’ll go there, okay?”

“Okay!” both girls said.

“I’m hungry,” Izzy said, glumly. “I’m
starving.
”

“I know,” Sophie said. “Which is why we have to get ready extra quickly, okay? And why we have to do
everything
that Aunty Sophie says, okay?” Sophie stared at both the girls as if she could hypnotically implant obedience into them. They stared back at her. She formulated a plan.

Of course Sophie’s plan, which was to empty Izzy’s treacherous bladder completely and get everyone out of the flat before malnutrition set in, did not work.

This is what happened instead.

Sophie sat Izzy on the toilet and told her not to move until she came back. She returned to her bedroom to dress and found Bella holding one of her Manolos in one hand and balancing precariously on the other with one foot. Sophie regarded the scene as if she had just come across Bella with her finger in the pin of a live grenade.

“Nooooo!” Sophie shouted commando style and, in her head at least, in slow motion.

Bella’s face fell, and she slumped on the bed facefirst, letting the shoe drop to the floor, from where Sophie scooped it up and cradled it momentarily before realizing that she had things a
little
out of perspective. She had been about to offer Bella a go at her low-heeled pumps when a clatter and a scream sounded from the bathroom. The Manolo was abandoned once again as Sophie realized her rookie error of leaving Izzy alone in the bathroom for longer than a nanosecond. She found Izzy jammed securely in the toilet, her calf sticking out at a right angle from the seat and wriggling furiously, her face and upper torso caked in Sophie’s expensive makeup collection.

Which meant another bath. And which Sophie was sure would mean another tantrum.

In any event, though, Izzy was amazingly contrite and even allowed Sophie to remove the offending fairy dress, which was now beyond all help, as long as Sophie promised to replace it with an identical one. Sophie chose not to worry about the logistics of that promise, concentrating only on the results it got.

Eventually she dressed in the bedroom, alongside both girls. Bella selected from the girls’ single suitcase a pair of red leggings with yellow dots, an electric blue T-shirt, a lime green cardigan, and a pink cotton ruffled mini-skirt to finish the outfit off. And, robbed of her fairy dress, Izzy carefully picked out items of clothing that were entirely yellow.

In the meantime, Sophie struggled to find clothes that were suitable for taking two small children to the supermarket. Sensible clothes were not Sophie’s strong point. Almost everything she bought was chosen to go to the office or a function in. And everything she bought was chosen with a particular pair of shoes in mind. Sophie put shoes first. If she saw a wonderful pair that she had absolutely nothing to wear with, she would buy them anyway. In her experience, shoes were like fashion magnets. The right clothes would simply be drawn to them. Sophie was especially proud of this philosophy she had invented all on her own, although she did have to admit that it sometimes took a lot of hard shopping to reach outfit Nirvana. Consequently, Sophie was limited on casual wear, principally because she didn’t do much casual wearing.

Eventually she found a pair of jeans that she had forgotten she had and possessed only because she had felt compelled to help her mum redecorate the house last year with washable stainproof paint. After some rooting about in the backs of her drawers, she found an old pink Calvin Klein T-shirt that had the logo spelled out in diamantés, which she pulled reluctantly over her head.

Sophie looked at her shoe rack, which was neatly attached to the inside of her wardrobe door, and scanned her shoes. The most sensible and expendable pair of shoes she had were from River Island, low kitten heels in magenta pink with pointed toes and a thin strap that crossed each toe horizontally, ending in a tiny bow.

Once, only yesterday in fact—although it seemed like a dim memory now—it had amused her no end that such a pair of shoes were her most sensible ones. Now it dismayed her. Not because she wished she were better prepared for all scenarios but because she wished that her life was back to normal.

When the threesome finally emerged from the flat, Sophie felt curiously triumphant, as if she had survived an apocalypse.

The thing is, she decided, squinting slightly in the glare of the bright winter sun, to keep your nerve. If I can just do that, it’ll be a breeze.

C
al was not nearly as enthusiastic about Sophie’s plans to turn bounty hunter as she was. Especially when she asked him to look up Louis Gregory on the Internet—as if the man and his whereabouts would be handily listed by Google in an A–Z directory of missing feckless fathers.

“This is not the telly, Sophie,” he told her impatiently over the phone the morning after she decided to find Louis Gregory herself, mainly by getting Cal to do it. “You don’t type a name into the Internet and then suddenly,
schum-schum-schum,
there’s the current location, address, and a satellite image of the person’s every movement. Do you know what I got when I typed Louis Gregory into the Search engine? Three hundred and eight-two thousand matches. And is your Louis Gregory
the
Louis Gregory? New Zealand’s greatest living sheep shearer Louis Gregory? Not unless he’s sixty-two and a Maori he’s not. I do have a job to do, you know. Just exactly when do you expect me to go through all of these entries that probably have nothing whatsoever to do with your Louis Gregory?” Sophie had tapped her chipped nails on the edge of her bed. She was nervous about being in the bedroom when the girls were not, but she didn’t want them to know she was looking for their dad too. She wasn’t even sure they knew they had a dad. They hadn’t mentioned him since they’d arrived. She wasn’t sure what sort of an effect that kind of news might have on them, but if it was anything on a par with their reaction to the news that she did not have Cbeebies on her TV, she didn’t want to risk it.

“Oh, come on, Cal. I need you here. It’s an emergency.”

“Why don’t you do it?” Cal snapped. “You’re the one on holiday after all.”

Sophie paused. She thought about telling him in detail about the inevitable demise of her laptop, involving a tube of John Frieda Sheer Blonde hair serum, the residue from an empty box of Coco Pops, and a pair of nail scissors, but she decided against it. She couldn’t stand the ridicule again; she could still hear the hysterical laughter of the IT support man ringing in her ears.

“My laptop’s broken,” she said. “I’m not getting a replacement until next week. And anyway, if this was a holiday, it’d be an all-expenses-paid trip to the Siberian salt mines of the former Soviet Union. Cal, you’re my personal assistant—assist!”

Cal tutted. “I think you’re taking the personal bit a bit too literally,” he muttered.

Sophie paused. She never stopped to think about the nature of their relationship too closely, but she had made the assumption that the occasional weekend shopping trip, the odd after-work cocktails in the city meant that it was more than just a professional one, that it was a friendship of sorts. She hoped so, because Cal was the only friend she managed to see regularly, even if the fact that he worked for her did help the friendship along. Perhaps she
was
asking too much of him. Perhaps she was straying into things-you-can-ask-your-boyfriend-to-do-on-the-grounds-that-you-let-him-have-sex-with-you territory.

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t mean to impose on you.”

Cal huffed again. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t pull the martyr act on me, love, I’m immune. Besides—I’ve got the answer to all of our problems.” He lowered his voice. “I know someone who can help.”

“Who?” Sophie asked, touched and reassured by Cal’s reclassification of her problems as “ours.”

“Maria Costello,” Cal said proudly. “Private detective. She’s not cheap, but she’s good—she
always
gets her man. We’ve got a lot in common in that respect.”

For a moment Sophie didn’t know what to say. She’d associated Cal’s friends and acquaintances with a number of professions, from drag queen to car mechanic, but she would never have guessed he’d know a private detective.

“A private detective?” she asked. “How do you know a private detective?”

Cal’s voice was rich with drama. “Oh, you know. I’ve done a little…let’s call it ‘freelance’ work for her.”

“Freelance work?” Sophie questioned him anxiously. “What sort of freelance work?”

“Well,” Cal whispered. “Have you ever heard of ‘the honey trap’?”

“Yes?” Sophie said uneasily.

“Well, honey, I was the honey in the trap!” Cal giggled.

“You’re lying!” Sophie cried, utterly scandalized. “Please tell me you’re lying. If this ever got out…you have to be lying,” she repeated.

Cal sighed. “Yes, all right, I am lying—spoilsport. Her offices are in the shop below my flat, but that’s just boring. Anyway, she
is
very good, and I’ve told her all about you, and she says she can find him, no problem. She says it will be, quote unquote, a piece of cake. Do you want to see her?”

“How much would it cost?” Sophie began uncertainly before she and Cal reached the same conclusion at exactly the same moment.

“Actually, I don’t care how much it costs,” she said.

“Trust me. You don’t care how much it costs,” Cal said simultaneously. “And besides,” he continued, “you have nothing better to spend all your money on.”

Sophie had to agree that, right at the moment, she did not. “All right, ask her to come to the flat today,” she said. “We’ll be here. I’ve worked out that, if we don’t actually leave the flat, we’ve got an eighty percent better chance of survival.”

“Righty-ho,” Cal said jauntily. “Now if you don’t mind, I think I’d better get back to my real job.”

“Is everything okay there?” Sophie asked anxiously, thinking about
her
real job. After all, she’d been out of the office for nearly forty-eight hours.

“Everything is fine. Nobody misses you at all,” Cal said, specifically to irritate her. “Except possibly your new boyfriend, Jakey.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Sophie said wearily.

“Of course he’s not, because you only like men when you’re not sure if they like you. Now Jake’s actually come out and said he wants to be in your life, you’ll get cold feet and run away and do spreadsheets or something—”

“Cal!” Sophie interrupted impatiently. “Why are we talking about this now?”

“Because Jake is too good to run away from.” Cal pressed on regardless. “If you want to keep him, you have to get over your fear of intimacy and stop acting like you’re a closet lesbian. Or a frigid closet lesbian.”

“Now I think you’re taking the ‘personal’ part of PA too literally,” Sophie said.

“I’m just saying, don’t make the mistake you made with Mr. Luscious Loss Adjuster.”

“What mistake?” Sophie asked him. “I only ever saw him from a distance. I never even spoke to him.”

“And that,” Cal finished matter-of-factly, “was the mistake!”

Maria Costello arrived at ten minutes past ten that night. It was a night that had followed a day that was, Sophie’s exhausted brain reasoned, as stress-free as a day was ever likely to get as long as the children were invading her flat. This was largely because she had worked out a fairly efficient containment system, involving food and television. She drew the curtains to exclude any unwanted foray of daylight onto the TV screen, and she watched daytime television all day, with the girls sitting on either side of her, occasionally rising from the sofa to bring them another snack. Fortunately they had been so starved of TV at Mrs. Stiles’s house that they were prepared to watched anything with awe, like a couple of cave girls who had just been brought forward in time fifty thousand years or so to marvel at the modern world inventions. As for Sophie, well, she didn’t care what she watched as long as it wasn’t another one of her precious possessions being executed.

“You are very old to have blond hair,” Bella had told Maria Costello as Sophie showed her into the blanket and clothes-strewn living room.

The detective had wrinkled up her slightly hooked nose as she looked around the room and then down at Bella. “And you are very young to be up this late,” she said, with a slightly stern upper-class Liverpudlian accent.

Sophie put her hand on Bella’s shoulder and drew the child a step closer to her, suddenly sensing how very small the little girl was in comparison to the rather large and rather solidly bosomed Ms. Costello. Sophie didn’t know exactly what she expected from a private dick, as Cal had begun to refer to her with a little giggle after every reference, but it hadn’t been a Day-Glo orange tan and jewelry almost as brassy as her hair.

Maria Costello must have guessed exactly what she was thinking. “You don’t need to blend in these days, love,” she said. “I can do almost all of my work from the office.” She winked at Bella. “Mind you, I’m a master of disguise when I need to be.”

“Who are you and what do you want from us?” Bella asked her, quoting verbatim a line she’d heard on
Neighbours
twice earlier in the day, once at lunchtime and once in the teatime repeat. At this point Sophie decided it was a good plan to get her back into bed. Nobody had to know anything until there was something to know.

“Maria is here to see me, Bella. It’s just about work, nothing to do with you. Now you’ve got your glass of water, haven’t you? So you run along and get into bed, because tomorrow we’re—” Sophie stopped dead in her tracks. She had nothing planned for the girls the following day except watching TV, eating dry cereal on the sofa and chicken nuggets and chips on the kitchen floor (ketchup required extra saftey measures). “Going to be awake again,” she finished lamely.

“Can I finish telling you the story about the flying fairy pony?” Bella asked her. She had begun this story—seemingly one she made up herself—the previous night. It was, surprisingly, quite gripping, but tempting as her offer was, now was not the time for chapter three.

“No, let’s save it for tomorrow, okay?—so that Izzy can hear it too. Go on, off you go.”

Bella eyed Maria Costello suspiciously before finally padding into the bedroom. Sophie smiled nervously at the formidable looking woman and suddenly felt quite small herself. She had expected Maria for most of the day, finally giving up on her making an appearance after 9:00
P.M
. So now Sophie was not prepared. She did not have
her
formidable woman clothes on. She had her Snoopy jim-jams on, and they didn’t have quite the same impact.

“Um, do you want a drink?” Sophie offered, thinking of tea, coffee, or hot chocolate.

“Got any whiskey?” Maria asked hopefully. Sophie hadn’t got any whiskey. She had two-thirds of a bottle of Baileys that Lisa had given to her at Christmas after drinking the first third of it sitting on Sophie’s office floor weeping about some bloke who hadn’t kissed her under the mistletoe. Sophie had thought about the bottle of Baileys a lot in the last couple of days, but so far she had not succumbed to it. Now that she was not alone, it was acceptable.

“I’ve got Baileys,” she suggested hopefully.

“Make it a double,” Maria said, so Sophie obligingly filled two mugs halfway with the coffee-colored liquor. Of course, Sophie did have glasses that would have been more suitable, but for some reason mugs seemed far more appropriate. Private detectives always drank whiskey (or Bailey’s) from cracked mugs on the TV.

“So.” Maria settled onto the sofa, kicking off her gold heels and tucking her feet up underneath her. “Did you know your sofa smells of—”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “So can you find him?”

Maria nodded and took a large mouthful of the Baileys, holding it over her tongue for a few seconds. “Let me get this straight. The guy leaves his pregnant wife in the lurch and runs off to God knows where to find himself and shag a load of tarts—am I right?” Sophie would have dropped her Baileys in surprise if she hadn’t been treasuring it so very much.

“Well, yes,” she said. “In principle.”

Clearly, Cal had told Maria the details of the case in his own no-nonsense style.

Sophie quickly filled Maria in on the real situation.

Maria’s face softened at the news, and she bit her glossed lips. “Oh, the poor little darlings,” she said gently.

Sophie just managed not to roll her eyes and say, “Yes, yes, blah, blah, blah. And me, what about poor little me?”

“Yes, I know,” she said briskly instead. “Terrible. And you see I can only have them temporarily, and after that they are going into care, so it is rather urgent—”

“Why?” Maria asked.

Sophie looked taken aback. “
Well,
because obviously the less time they spend in care the better,” she said, feeling that that was rather obvious.

“No, I mean why can you only have them temporarily?” Maria asked her.

Sophie chose her words carefully. “I’m just not a person who can…who is very good with children. It’s not fair to them.”

Maria scrutinized her as she knocked back her mug of Baileys. “Trust me, you have to be a seriously shit person to be a worse option than some of the care homes I’ve seen. And besides, you looked like you were doing all right to me.”

Sophie held Maria’s gaze but said nothing, choosing to skim over the issue of what kind of person she might or might not be. Maria was just one more in a long line of people who seemed to want to know exactly what made her tick.

Sophie was tired of being scrutinized. Tired of people trying to work her out. She didn’t want to know the answers to any of these questions, so why should they? At least in this case, she was the customer, and the customer was always right.