After Tiger had been settled into his recovery cage and Clive and I had wished each other a happy Christmas, I popped round to Naomi and Tony’s with my Christmas gifts to find Naomi stressed out because Bembe had a cold and Precious was teething. Tony, who worked shifts at a local hospital, wasn’t home yet, although he had got Christmas off this year.
“Poor man,” said my friend as she opened the door to me. “His first Christmas off for two years and both the children are ill and cranky.”
Naomi herself looked flushed and tired, holding a bawling Precious in her arms. Bembe was crying somewhere in the background. It was literally Rosie’s idea of hell.
I reached out to take Precious from her. “Go and see to Bembe. I’ll hold the baby for a bit.”
Naomi looked doubtful. “Are you sure? I don’t want to give you a headache on Christmas Eve.”
I could hardly hear her over the screaming. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “My Christmas is cancelled anyway.”
“I almost wish mine was,” Naomi said wryly, heading off to see to her son.
Precious’s screaming didn’t faze me too much, though it probably would have done if she’d been my daughter and I’d been listening to it all day long.
I improvised, walking her around the living room, chatting to her about the Christmas decorations, and showing her the coloured lights on the Christmas tree and the twinkling fairy lights Naomi had arranged around the mirror. Then I sang to her—Christmas carols and Christmas songs, whatever popped into my mind—rocking her in my arms, listening to the distant sound of Naomi reading Bembe stories when her cries began to fade a little. Finally, she stopped screaming and fell asleep, and suddenly all was quiet in the flat.
I stopped singing and hummed instead, rocking the baby gently while I gazed down into her face. Naomi and Tony had chosen the perfect name for her. She was precious. So very precious.
Sometimes I thought that if only Rosie would let herself do this—hold a sleeping baby, gaze down at the perfect curl of her eyelashes, touch the silken down of her head, be the focus of a sudden, unexpected smile—she would change her opinion about having children. I couldn’t, in all honesty, imagine how anybody could be immune.
“Thank you,” Naomi said softly, coming back into the room. “Want me to take her and put her in her Moses basket?”
“I’ll hold her for just a little while longer to make sure she’s properly asleep,” I said, and Naomi gave me a knowing smile.
“Bembe’s absolutely sparko. When you can bear to let her go, we can have a little pre-Christmas drink.”
“Only a small one,” I said. “I’m officially on duty.”
Naomi stretched wearily. “You and me both,” she said. Then she looked at me, still cradling her sleeping daughter. “Are you really sure adopting a child is what you want?”
I kept my gaze on Precious’s face, taking my time to reply. “Honestly?” I said. “I really don’t know.”
The next day, Tiger was doing as well as could be expected, and after his owners had driven away with him to carry on with their Christmas and I’d texted Clive and locked up the surgery, the holiday stretched emptily before me. I walked home, wondering how things were going for Rosie and Giorgio. Whether Sylvia was happy on her Caribbean cruise. How Mark was getting on with Grace’s family.
For a moment, as I turned my coat collar up against the drizzle, I felt a little sorry for myself. Then I remembered Jake and felt a twitch of excitement instead. I hadn’t told Rosie I might be seeing him. I hadn’t told anybody about it because I didn’t want to feel under pressure. I wanted to be able to make a decision based purely on my instincts. Now here I was, alone with those instincts, and they were telling me to go for it. That spending time with Jake on Christmas Day would be fun, whether we ended up in bed together or playing a competitive game of Scrabble. And after the last two Christmases and my recent stresses, fun was exactly what I needed.
My phone was already in my hand, ready to call Jake, when I reached my flat.
But I never got to make the call. Because someone was sitting on my steps waiting for me—someone with a hat pulled down over his ears against the cold.
Mark.
28
“Merry Christmas,” Mark wished me, but his face looked broken, and it was all too obvious there was nothing merry about the Christmas he was having.
“Mark. What’s happened? Why are you here?”
He got up from the steps and looked down inside his coat. When I heard a whimper, I guessed immediately what was wrong—even before a furry black-and-white head peeped out at me from his coat collar.
“Grace didn’t want him. Can you believe that? Wouldn’t even entertain the idea of having him. Wanted him gone right away. We rowed. It was awful, Beth. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. So I came here.”
The puppy was wriggling, trying to break free from the confines of Mark’s coat.
I pulled myself together. “Come in, come in.”
“Sure you don’t mind?”
“Don’t be daft.”
I led the way inside, setting my phone down on the table and heading straight over to fill the kettle, my mind in an absolute whirl.
“We’re not disrupting your plans or anything?”
Any thoughts of hot sex with Jake on Christmas Day afternoon had immediately evaporated at the sight of Mark’s defeated expression. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him look like this—as if he’d had a good kicking. Apologising for taking up space.
“I just finished work,” I told him. “I had to wait for an injured cat to be collected. But let me meet this little guy.”
I went closer, and the puppy wriggled into my hands, a bundle of squirmy black-and-white fluff with a black patch over one eye. Totally delicious. “Hey, buddy. Nice to meet you.” I glanced over at Mark. “Still no name?”
He shook his head. “We didn’t get that far. Like I said, Grace wanted nothing to do with him. It was as if I’d offered her a pet garter snake or something.”
The puppy was licking me all over my face. It was impossible not to smile. He was turning me into goo, the way all puppies did.
“How can I have been married to her for two years and not have any idea she’d react like this? It’s crazy.”
I sat down on the sofa with the puppy wriggling against my chest. “Didn’t she explain why she didn’t want him?”
Mark shrugged out of his coat and tossed it onto a chair. “She said something about not having the lifestyle for a dog, and me needing to get it out of the house before she bonded with it. But it wasn’t just what she said, Beth. It was the way she said it. So cold.”
I thought back to Kenwood Place, when I’d taken Jasper over to Grace and Iris. Grace hadn’t tried to stroke him once, come to think of it.
“Is she at home on her own now?”
“Her family will have arrived by now, I suppose.”
He sat down on the chair Clare usually chose, elbows resting on his knees, the mix of emotions on his face reminding me of the little boy who’d pedalled like fury across London Fields to tell me and Rosie there was no such thing as Father Christmas.